GOLD

Various artists

records

Oct 24 – Dec 19, 2026

We Buy White Albums by Rutherford Chang, 3717 vinyl records, paper record sleeves, neon sign, cardboard boxes, 2006-2025. Courtesy Estate of Rutherford Chang.

Serakai Studio presents records, a participatory exhibition at GOLD. Like the two sides of a vinyl record, records is made up of two complementary presentations, each exploring a different aspect of the medium. Side A, Experimental Sound: Asia, celebrates the exploratory spirit and sheer joy of experimenting with sound. Side B presents Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums (2006–2025), a single installation that traces the social and art-historical life of a defining moment in pop, while touching on key concerns of Minimal and Conceptual art.

Side A — Experimental Sound: Asia brings together 300–400 vinyls, CDs and cassettes chosen by artists, musicians, DJs and researchers invited by Serakai Studio from Hong Kong, Tokyo and Bangkok.  Each practitioner was tasked to select recordings that have influenced their own practice, creating a subjective constellation of sounds, connections and histories that can form the beginning of a larger future collection and archive.

Side B presents the late artist Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums (2006–2025), his original collection of thousands of first-pressing copies of The Beatles’ White Album that the artist acquired between 2006 and 2025.  Through its unique design and its use, each record encompasses its individual history, which, when viewed together, turns this mass-produced object of pop-legacy into a compelling story of individual and collective cultural and social memory. 

Together, the two presentations explore the record in its different cultural forms: as a carrier of sound — fixed, circulated and re-experienced across time and geography; and as an object, collected, exchanged, marked and transformed through use.  In doing so, records celebrates not only the music itself, but the design, packaging and simple pleasure of handling a physical object.

SIDE A — EXPERIMENTAL SOUND: ASIA

The boundaries around sound have long been fluid: between artist and musician, sound art and experimental music, song and artwork.  These distinctions are further blurred as works move between different scenes and communities. Experimental Sound: Asia encompasses diverse and overlapping histories that resist any single genealogy.

Focusing primarily on works produced before the 2010s and the widespread transition to digital formats, Side A reflects a period when recorded sound circulated through physical media. Vinyl, cassette and later CDs could be shared, collected, archived and recontextualised as they moved across networks and geographies.

At GOLD, these recordings are returned to active circulation. Across three listening stations, visitors can choose and play individual works, moving between minimal music, noise and other experimental forms.  Listening alone or collectively, visitors become active participants in the exhibition, their choices composing an ever-changing soundscape within GOLD and creating new pathways through the collection.

 SIDE B — RUTHERFORD CHANG, WE BUY WHITE ALBUMS (2006–2025)

For almost twenty years Rutherford Chang sought out first-pressing copies of The Beatles’ 1968 White Album. The album marked a radical departure for the band, both in sound and presentation. Its famously austere sleeve, designed by British artist Richard Hamilton, was conceived as an almost entirely blank white surface, embossed only with the band’s name and an individual serial number — giving each mass-produced copy the character of an individual art edition.

Over time, these seemingly identical covers accumulated drawings, annotations, dedications, stains, damage and wear, each acquiring a distinct history through ownership, use and personal expression.Seen together, the records become an evolving social document, revealing how a mass-produced cultural object can become a site of intimate, individual expression — and how, in aggregate, those individual histories form a broader cultural memory.

The work explores a unique period in music in pop-art, and furthers links to other important movements of the time; Minimal Art’s obsession with the White Cube, the distilling aspect of Conceptual Art and New Music’s new definition of sound itself.

GOLD by Serakai Studio
G/F Remex Centre
42 Wong Chuk Hang Road
Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong
Thu and Sat 2pm to 7pm
Fri 2pm to 8pm
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Situated in the heart of Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong’s most innovative contemporary art district, GOLD positions uncertainty not as a limitation, but as a necessary condition for cultural spaces of the future. Housed at street-level in a former bank and jewellery shop, GOLD pays homage to its past while reimagining new possibilities for cultural spaces. Combining the curatorial depth of an institution with the agility of an independent organisation, GOLD functions as a cultural test lab — part exhibition space, part concept incubator, and part gathering point for creative exchange. Through a programme that brings together surprising combinations of art, fashion, music, design, and technology, GOLD reflects Serakai Studio’s conviction that culture flourishes where creative disciplines collide.